Miscellanea Agnostica

The Religious Right has become extremely “activist” in its tactics over the last few months. Since it no longer runs the country at the federal level, and has lost a great deal of influence in a number of states, they’ve started using a wider range of methods to get their message — of total subservience by all Americans to their own form of rigid, Protestant fundamentalism, and a government designed their way to force their metaphysics on everyone — out to the masses. The latest example of this effort can be seen in this report by the St Petersburg Times:

Christian group’s billboards denounce separation of church, state

A Hillsborough public policy group whose Christian platform included a push for a state ban on gay marriage has embraced a new attack on an old target: the separation of church and state. …

The message, as explained on www.noseparation.org, is that “America’s government was made only for people who are moral and religious.”

“The Judeo-Christian foundation that the Founding Fathers established when America began is the reason that this country has prospered for 200-plus years,” said Kemple, president and sole employee of the local Community Issues Council, which paid for the Web site.

“The fact is, for the last 40 years, as anti-God activists have incrementally removed the recognition of God’s place in the establishment of our country, we have gone downhill.”

These Religious Right activists are not averse to making things up in order to convince people of their point:

The billboards showcase quotes from early American leaders like John Adams, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. Most of the quotes portray a national need for Christian governance.

Others carry the same message but with fictional attribution, as with one billboard citing George Washington for the quote, “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”

You would think that such devout Christians wouldn’t be so quick to be dishonest, but guess again! They make no apologies for weaving fiction:

“I don’t believe there’s a document in Washington’s handwriting that has those words in that specific form,” Kemple said. “However, if you look at Washington’s quotes, including his farewell address, about the place of religion in the political sphere, there’s no question he could have said those exact words.”

There, you see? They think Washington said things of this sort, and they’re so sure of it, that they just fabricate it, and expect no one will know any better.

Yep, just another bunch of lying liars for Jesus.

These dominionists are horrifically dangerous … in case you haven’t noticed … and they aren’t above old propaganda tricks such as those once employed by the Third Reich, the Kremlin, or Chairman Mao.

In case there’s any doubt … none of the Founding Fathers were Christian fundamentalists. Not one. (The reason? Christian fundamentalism did not come into existence until the 19th century — by which time all the Founding Fathers were long gone.) Washington never desired a theocracy, and Jefferson was opposed to dogmatic religion of any kind. Thomas Paine penned one of the all-time greatest anti-religion polemics, Age of Reason. For details on what the Founding Fathers actually thought, and what it means for the U.S. to be a “secular state,” please have a look at this page.

It would be nice if these people grew up and accepted the existence of non-Christians in their United States … but I’m not counting on it ever happening.

As a brief follow-up on my earlier blog entry concerning the Rightists’ “birther” delusion, it turns out that Obama’s original, long-form birth certificate cannot be produced, not merely because the state of Hawai’i provides no means to request it … but it has been destroyed. The Los Angeles Times Show Tracker reports on what CNN has found out (WebCite cached article):

The website TVNewser reported today that Klein sent an e-mail to staffers of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” just as the program went to air, informing them that CNN researchers had determined that Hawaiian officials discarded all paper documents in 2001. A long-form birth certificate with details about the doctor who delivered Obama no longer exists, they reported.

I’m sure all those dutiful Rightists out there will say, “Sure, CNN claims that. They’re CNN, after all, the flagship media outlet of the Liberal Media Elite®!” While CNN does lean toward the Left, though, the claim that the state of Hawai’i destroyed the long-form certificate in 2001 is something that could easily be verified … meaning one need not take CNN’s word for it.

Of course, despite having been told this by his own network, Lou Dobbs continues to pander to the birther-delusionists, as the LA Times goes on to say:

In his show Thursday, Dobbs did note the explanation from Hawaiian officials, though he went on to devote another segment to the topic, interviewing CNN contributor Roland Martin and Rep. Ted Poe, a co-sponsor of a bill that would require future presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates. …

In the segment, Dobbs stressed that he has said repeatedly that he believes Obama is a citizen, something that he said his critics in the “left-wing media” ignore.

Note how deftly Dobbs plays both sides … on the one hand he concedes Obama is a citizen, but on the other, he courts those who think otherwise. In other words, he’s being disingenuous. His duplicity is especially obvious, since he also said:

But he continued to press the question of why Obama has not shown a long-form birth certificate. “When this could be dispelled so quickly, and — and simply by producing it, why not do it?” Dobbs asked.

Earth to Lou — and all the other birther-delusionists out there: Now you know why Obama can’t produce the long-form cerificate … IT DOESN’T EXIST! The time has finally come for you to grow the fuck up and stop demanding what can never be provided.

P.S. To everyone who goes along with the old canard about CNN being part of the Liberal Media Elite® … if this is true, please explain how such an outlet could possibly keep guys like Dobbs on its payroll? Just wondering.

It’s official. The Republic of Ireland — a generally-enlightened country whose economy boomed through most of the 2000′s — has slid back into the Dark Ages. It is now illegal to blaspheme in Ireland, as the New York Times Lede blog reports:

After some hesitation, Ireland’s president, Mary McAleese, signed into law on Thursday a controversial new measure which makes it a crime, punishable by a fine of up to $35,000, to publish or utter blasphemous statements in the Irish Republic.

As The Irish Times explained in April, the new law was crafted after someone noticed that while the country’s constitution clearly calls blasphemy a criminal act, Irish legislators had failed to give the nation’s police force the legal means to hold blasphemers to account.

Ireland’s response to the problem was not to amend its Constitution to remove the offending clause … it was, instead, to dig in, keep it, and make it enforceable.

Nice.

This means lots of things are now impermissible in Ireland, probably including the showing of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a scene from which actually exemplifies (via parody) what’s wrong with laws against blasphemy, as the Lede showed.

Here is the offending scene from YouTube:

I can only assume it’s illegal to view for someone in Ireland to cite material from my blog, since it has so much godless-heathen content. Heck, it might even be illegal for someone in Ireland merely to view this blog! So if you’re reading this blog in Ireland, best of luck, and hopefully the authorities will never find out you’ve been here. (I certainly won’t tell!)

The Lede blog offers the following defense of Ireland’s new ban on blasphemy:

In fairness to Irish lawmakers, it should be noted that six American states — Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wyoming — still have laws against blasphemy on the books, although they are only occasionally enforced in the 21st century.

I’m sure the New York Times meant this to be taken humorously, but sadly enough, there are some who will say that Ireland’s ban on blasphemy is acceptable, because these states also ban it … following the old “two wrongs make a right” thinking which is decidedly fallacious (but then, religionists never met a fallacy they didn’t like).

I mentioned this controversy a couple of times already, in an earlier blog post on the “moon-landing” hoaxers, but apparently this is another one that just won’t die. This particular misbelief — that President Barack Obama is not a “natural-born citizen” of the US as required by the Constitution and therefore not legally the President — is a favorite of the Religious Right and assorted other paranoid conspiracy theorists.

It became an issue during the 2008 campaign, and despite his electoral victory, it appears never to have died out. It kicked up afresh when a “birther” showed up at Republican Congressman Mike Castle’s “town meeting,” sanctimoniously raging about Obama not having a birth certificate and waving her own — which she believes constitutes proof that Obama refuses to provide his own. The Chicago Tribune‘s Swamp blog comments on this and other events that have pushed this misbelief back into the limelight:

Listen to the cheers for the woman holding up her birth certificate and asking why the president won’t share his.

Listen to the boos when a Republican congressman asserts rather assuredly that the president of the United States, a Democrat, “is a citizen of the United States” …

Listen to the Pledge of Allegiance break out.

Yes, indeed … the assembled childish crowd was angered by Castle’s response that Obama is, in fact, a citizen. And yes, they actually launched into a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance … as if that, too, were somehow proof that Obama is not a citizen.

Folks, the matter of Obama’s birth was settled long ago. Obama has produced all the documentation necessary to show that he is a “natural-born citizen” as defined by federal law. Claims that his birth certification is not valid, are simply untrue, as FactCheck has demonstrated conclusively:

Some claim that Obama posted a fake birth certificate to his Web page. That charge leaped from the blogosphere to the mainstream media earlier this week when Jerome Corsi, author of a book attacking Obama, repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News. …

Corsi isn’t the only skeptic claiming that the document is a forgery. Among the most frequent objections we saw on forums, blogs and e-mails are:

1. The birth certificate doesn’t have a raised seal.
2. It isn’t signed.
3. No creases from folding are evident in the scanned version.
4. In the zoomed-in view, there’s a strange halo around the letters.
5. The certificate number is blacked out.
6. The date bleeding through from the back seems to say “2007,” but the document wasn’t released until 2008.
7. The document is a “certification of birth,” not a “certificate of birth.”

Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it’s stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka (who uses a signature stamp rather than signing individual birth certificates). We even brought home a few photographs.

Said photographs are available on the FactCheck page in question, including full-size high-resolution photos if you click on the smaller images on the page itself. FactCheck explains a bit more about this document and why it constitutes proof that Obama is truly a “natural-born citizen”:

The document is a “certification of birth,” also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents’ hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health’s birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response.

Note that Hawai’i is not the only place that provides a “short-form certification” rather than the “long-form certificate.” A friend of mine recently requested a copy of her birth certificate, in the town of her birth, and was given a generated document very similar to this one. It was more than enough to get her a passport … which means it passes muster according to federal standards of citizenship.

Something the “birthers” fail to understand is that, while the Constitution requires that the President be a natural-born citizen, it does not state what documentation is required to show this. There is nothing in the Constitution about whether birth certificates or certifications of birth are necessary. Rather, it allows the federal government to decide what is necessary. And according to federal statutes and legal decisions, what Obama has provided, suffices … just as a similar document sufficed for my friend when she applied for her passport.

While the sanctimoniously-outraged woman at Mike Castle’s “town hall meeting” was able to get her long-form birth certificate, for any number of reasons, not all Americans are able to get them. Local officials in some jurisdictions simply do not provide them, and offer no means to get them.

Whether Obama is a “natural-born citizen” is a matter for officials in Hawai’i to decide … and they have done so, as FactCheck explains in the article:

Update Nov. 1: The Associated Press quoted Chiyome Fukino as saying that both she and the registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, have personally verified that the health department holds Obama’s original birth certificate.

Fukino also was quoted by several other news organizations. The Honolulu Advertiser quoted Fukino as saying the agency had been bombarded by requests, and that the registrar of statistics had even been called in at home in the middle of the night.

Honolulu Advertiser, Nov. 1 2008: “This has gotten ridiculous,” state health director Dr. Chiyome Fukino said yesterday. “There are plenty of other, important things to focus on, like the economy, taxes, energy.” … Will this be enough to quiet the doubters? “I hope so,” Fukino said. “We need to get some work done.”

Fukino said she has “personally seen and verified that the Hawaii State Department of Health has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures.”

It turns out that Fukino was incorrect, back in November; it was not enough. His word and those of other local officials are simply being ignored by those who are too committed to their irrational beliefs and delusional thinking to accept otherwise.

It’s really time for the “birthers” like the raging woman at Castle’s “town hall meeting” to grow the hell up and stop denying reality … but we all know they will not do so.

I’m not a big fan of Chris Matthews, but he has a point, as the Tribune‘s Swamp blog entry mentions:

See Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball question Rep. John Campbell, a Republican from California, about the “crazy” bill that he and others are sponsoring requiring future candidates for president to present their birth certificates. …

“Wouldn’t you like to put it to rest? That’s what this proposal is all about,” replies Campbell, noting that people also questioned Republican Sen. John McCain’s credentials because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. …

“Nice try,” replies Matthews. “What you’re doing is appeasing the nut-cases… You’re verifying the paranoia out there… You are playing to the crazies… You guys are playing to the whacko wing” of the Republican Party.

It’s true. Acting as though the “birthers” have a legitimate objection, only makes them feel as though their delusion is well-founded. Yet, as the Swamp blog relates, even Campbell has little doubt:

“As far as I know,” concedes the congressman, pressed to say whether Obama was born in the United States. “Yes,” he says, “I believe so.”

If this concession is good enough for Campbell, it should be good enough for everyone.

The artist known by the single name “Madonna” has a long history of stirring up religious controversy, mostly invoking the wrath of Catholics and the Vatican (which has several times called for boycotts against her). Perhaps the most significant such controversy flared in 1989 with the release of her video for “Like A Prayer,” which featured — for no known reason — burning crosses, as well as her dancing and lying around suggestively inside what appears to be a Catholic church. Her mock crucifixion staged during performances in 2006 didn’t exactly win her any Catholic fans, either. Some of the outrage over those was understandable — if only slightly.

But the controversy over her upcoming tour, including appearances in Poland, is a little hard to figure out. The CBC reports on this particular dust-up:

A Catholic group is planning public prayer sessions to protest Madonna’s first appearance in Poland because the concert falls on the date of a significant religious festival.

The movement is being led by an ultra-conservative councillor in Warsaw, who wants the city to ban Madonna’s concert. …

Aug. 15, the date of Madonna’s sold-out Polish concert, is the Assumption, which celebrates Mary being taken bodily to heaven after her death. About 90 per cent of Poland’s 38 million people are Roman Catholic.

Apparently the Feast of the Assumption is a really serious holiday in Poland. Roman Catholics … as well as Anglicans … around the world observe the Feast of the Assumption every August 15. All sorts of events … not just Madonna concerts … are held that day, in Catholic-majority countries.

This seems to be a problem in Poland only. I’m not sure why, except that August 15 also happens to be the Day of the Polish Army, a commemoration of the Poles’ victory over the Soviets in the Battle of Warsaw in 1920. Moreover, and in spite of this even, concerts are frequently part of holiday celebrations, the world over.

So all in all, this whole thing is very strange.

As a follow-up to my blog entry from last week … evangelist Tony Alamo — whose real name is Bernie Lazar Hoffman — has been convicted. Here’s the report from CNN:

A jury in Arkansas convicted evangelist Tony Alamo on Friday of 10 federal counts of taking minors across state lines for sex, according to the court in the Western District in Arkansas.

Of course, Alamo Hoffman has claimed not to have done anything wrong … and following the usual playbook of the paranoid conspiracy theorist, claims he was set up by the government:

In a phone interview last year with CNN, [Alamo Hoffman] called the accusations a hoax. …

Asked why authorities were searching the property, Alamo compared himself to Christ.

“Why were they after Jesus,” he asked. “It’s the same reason. Jesus is living within me.”

Perhaps you don’t realize it, Mr Alamo Hoffman, but making yourself into a living messiah is heretical … still, I’m sure your Christian sheep won’t be dissuaded from believing in you as ardently as ever. True believers never let insignificant little things like federal criminal convictions get in the way of their irrational metaphysics.

The campaign to inject religion — specifically, protestant evangelical Christianity — into the nation’s public schools ran into a bit of a snag a few years ago, when “intelligent design” was found by a federal court to have been a fraudulent cover for “creationism,” which itself had been ruled a religion. Of course, they haven’t given up — religionazis don’t know how to give up! — but they’ve changed tactics.

Instead of trying to get their religion into public-school science classrooms via the “intelligent design” scam, they’re now working instead on getting it into history classrooms. The (UK) Guardian reports on one such effort that’s well under way in Texas:

The Christian right is making a fresh push to force religion onto the school curriculum in Texas with the state’s education board about to consider recommendations that children be taught that there would be no United States if it had not been for God.

Members of a panel of experts appointed by the board to revise the state’s history curriculum, who include a Christian fundamentalist preacher who says he is fighting a war for America’s moral soul, want lessons to emphasise the part played by Christianity in the founding of the US and that religion is a civic virtue.

Opponents have decried the move as an attempt to insert religious teachings in to the classroom by stealth, similar to the Christian right’s partially successful attempt to limit the teaching of evolution in biology lessons in Texas.

Having a degree in history I find this effort repugnant. Religionists typically believe themselves to possess credentials in the field of history, merely by virtue of their beliefs. The truth is, they have no understanding of the subject. And their lack of understanding is betrayed by the claims they make about this effort.

There is nothing about Christianity that made the development of democracy in the US inevitable. Christian doctrine does not acknowledge any role for “the people” or “the masses” to control anything — ever.

The only forms of government dealt with in the Bible, are monarchies (e.g. when the Hebrews were in Egypt, and later their own monarchy which became two), tribal confederations (i.e. the Judges period), and then in the New Testament, the Roman state. In the Bible and other writings, Christians are exhorted to obey the authorities whom God has ordained (cf e.g. Romans 13:1-3). These orders to Christians further the cause of autocracy and dictatorship, rather than democracy, and do not even allow for a vox populi to guide the state.

Later in the Middle Ages, in western Europe, Christianity enveloped itself around the notion of monarchies. The coronation of monarchs and princes, for instance, became a religious rite (even though it was never called a “sacrament”). The same was true even for lower levels of nobility … being named a knight, for instance, often included the saying of a Mass. For centuries, far from agitating for democracy, Christianity wrapped its tentacles around western Europe’s feudal system and clamped down on it, controlling it whenever and wherever possible.

In the eastern Roman Empire, the state was even more closely tied to Christianity. Byzantine emperors meddled in religious affairs regularly, and for the most part, either appointed patriarchs and bishops, or were consulted on their appointment. Many ministers of the Byzantine government were themselves clergy or oblates in service to the Church.

These history-revising religionazis also have a twisted notion of historical causation. While the majority of the colonial population was Christian, this does not mean their Christian beliefs brought about democracy there. It merely means that most of those who decided to build a democracy, were Christians. It doesn’t mean any more than that.

If anyone thinks children are well-served by Texas’s current Bible-thumper-run public education system, the Guardian article makes a sound point:

There’s no doubt that history education needs a boost in Texas.

According to test results, one-third of students think the Magna Carta was signed by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and 40% believe Lincoln’s 1863 emancipation proclamation was made nearly 90 years earlier at the constitutional convention.

Way to go, Texas fundies. Y’all’re teachin’ dem dere chilluns ’bout Gawd ‘n’ all … but y’all’re fogittin’ da udder stuff dey needs ta know.

The “abstinence-only” sex-educational philosophy of the George W. Bush administration, founded in unflinching Christian thinking, has turned out not to be as effective as its proponents had believed. The (UK) Guardian describes a report just issued by the US CDC on the matter:

Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush’s evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US’s major public health body.

In a report that will surprise few of Bush’s critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.

This is not news, though … earlier reports have reached similar conclusions. This is just one more to throw on the pile of studies that shows abstinence-only doesn’t work.

Just in case any of the Bible-thumpers claim that these increases are due to the prevalence of “secular progressives” who’ve somehow thwarted those godly abstinence-only programs, it turns out the increase was in those regions most loyal to the abstinence-only philosophy:

The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.

Curiously, proponents of abstinence-only refuse to see this as a massive “fail.” Rather, they claim it’s because abstinence-only hasn’t saturated society profoundly enough:

Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for American Values, which describes itself as a supporter of traditional marriage and “against liberal education and cultural forces”, said the abstinence message is overwhelmed by a culture obsessed with sex.

Just another example of how religionazis always ignore or de-emphasize any facts that contradict their metaphysical beliefs.

The next that will happen, I suppose, is that Fox News will attempt to spin this news to appear to mean the opposite of what it actually does. Sound paranoid? No way … they’ve done it before!

No sooner did I publish my last blog post on irrational and erroneous beliefs, especially about Obama’s citizenship and the putative “moon-landing hoax,” than I noticed that the “moon-landing hoax” theory has a public proponent, and that is Whoopi Goldberg. This report comes via Real Clear Politics (video available there):

Whoopi Goldberg questioned the original moon landing on today’s edition of “The View.” Goldberg, a co-host, wondered who shot the footage and why the flag was “rippling” if there was no wind.

The flag rippling has been explained — by Mythbusters and others — and the lander had external cameras requiring no one to hold them.

Not that these facts are likely to sway Whoopi or any other moon-hoaxer. It would be nice if people like Ms Goldberg weren’t so gullible or ignorant … but they are.

Americans are not only among the most religious people in the occidental world, they’re also among the most paranoid and conspiracy-minded. Perhaps the two tendencies are psychologically linked … I tend to think so, especially since perhaps the most common paranoid-conspiracy theory currently in circulation — i.e. the claim that President Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen — is mostly being propagated by Christian fundamentalists. That Obama is, indeed, a citizen — as explained by numerous sources, ranging from fact-verifying groups like FactCheck, to major media outlets like the Los Angeles Times, to Web sites such as Snopes — has had absolutely no measurable effect on this belief among fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. Facts do not matter to them, not when there’s a paranoid conspiracy they can cling to instead.

The 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing has also pushed into the open yet another conspiracy theory, which likewise appears never to die. CNN reports on this persistent controversy:

It captivated millions of people around the world for eight days in the summer of 1969. It brought glory to the embattled U.S. space program and inspired beliefs that anything was possible.

It’s arguably the greatest technological feat of the 20th century.

And to some, it was all a lie.

Forty years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon, a small cult of conspiracy theorists maintains the historic event — and the five subsequent Apollo moon landings — were staged. These people believe NASA fabricated the landings to trump their Soviet rivals and fulfill President Kennedy’s goal of ferrying humans safely to and from the moon by the end of the 1960s. …

Conspiracy theories about the Apollo missions began not long after the last astronaut returned from the moon in 1972. Bill Kaysing, a technical writer for Rocketdyne, which built rocket engines for NASA’s Apollo program, published a 1974 book, “We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle.” …

Decades later, Kaysing’s beliefs formed the foundation for “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” a sensational 2001 Fox TV documentary that spotted eerie “inconsistencies” in NASA’s Apollo images and TV footage.

Is there a connection between the same Fox News channel, which is currently fueling the “Obama-is-not-a-citizen” mantra, and the Fox Entertainment division that aired this documentary? I doubt it. They’re part of the same media empire, yes, but are separately run. Fox Entertainment has given us many things that the religionazis at Fox News would never have approved of, e.g. Married With Children.

But I digress.

That the moon landings were hoaxed is, of course, nonsense. At least one of the reasons is one that CNN cites:

Critics of moon-landing hoax theorists, and there are many, say it would be impossible for tens of thousands of NASA employees and Apollo contractors to keep such a whopping secret for almost four decades.

Not to mention an even more obvious objection: Had NASA “hoaxed” the Apollo 11 moon landing, why would they have gone to the expense of faking several more? If the point was to make people think astronauts had landed on the moon, that would have been accomplished by just the first “hoax.” What need would there be to orchestrate any more?

What’s more, there’ve also been several attempts to show that the moon hoaxer’s claims are untrue … most recently this was done by the TV show Mythbusters, just under a year ago, in one of their more famous episodes. Also, astronomer Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy has an extensive, point-by-point rebuttal of the Fox network so-called “documentary,” along with a list of other moon-hoax-related resources for your perusal. [Just added: The Skeptic's Dictionary has a new entry on the moon-landing hoax, too.]

But as it turns out, none of this really helps alleviate the controversy. The people who subscribe to it are impervious to insignificant little things like “facts” and “verification.” Those don’t matter … the only thing that does matter, is one’s emotional attachment to the conspiracy theory. Of course, that’s what conspiracy theories and religious fundamentalism have in common — that underlying appeal to emotion and sentimentality. Ultimately that’s all they have going for them … but given how susceptible human beings are to emotion and sentiment, that’s more than enough. People usually choose wishful thinking over verifiable fact.

What do you do when you’re a career politician who screwed up big-time, and has been watching other politicians, pundits, and the media write your political obituary over the last couple weeks? That’s the quandary facing South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, about whom I’ve blogged a couple times already. Like a dope addict who can’t get enough of a favorite drug, Sanford somehow cannot resist seizing back the spotlight of attention he once enjoyed. Toward that end, he’s indulging his “attention” compulsion once more … by sending a missive to South Carolina newspapers (here it is, via the Columbia State, the paper which originally broke the story of his infidelity and hypocrisy):

It is true that I did wrong and failed at the largest of levels, but equally true is the fact that God can make good of our respective wrongs in life. In this vein, while none of us has the chance to attend our own funeral, in many ways I feel like I was at my own in the past weeks, and surprisingly I am thankful for the perspective it has afforded.

Like any dutifully religious GOP southerner, Sanford drops the “G”-word almost at the beginning, and keeps inserting it repeatedly, along with lots of other traditional Religious Right canards and code-words:

One, forgiveness and grace really do matter. I used to believe that at an intellectual level; now it is at the level of heart. …

Two, life is indeed about way more than public standing or political views; it’s about recognizing that none of us is the arbiter of truth, that there are moral absolutes and that there is a God to whom we will all report for our actions. …

It’s in the spirit of making good from bad that I am committing to you and the larger family of South Carolinians to use this experience both to trust God in his larger work of changing me and, from my end, to work to becoming a better and more effective leader. …

It means less time fighting the tide, and a greater awareness of the fact that God controls it.

Note his mention of moral absolutes, his desire for forgiveness, his mentions of “the heart,” grace, and trusting God. These phrases and more are all terms his slavering religious worshippers will eagerly devour … or at least, he hopes they will. He also claims some humility:

I’ve been humbled and broken as never before in my life, and as a consequence have given up areas of control in a way that I never have before.

This is, of course, disingenuine. There is absolutely no “humility” to be found in dispatching a letter — ostensibly to all the people of South Carolina — to be published in major newspapers! True “humility” would have been the exact opposite … i.e. for Sanford to get back to work, quietly, and without trumpeting himself all over his state’s media outlets once again. Once again we have an example of Sanford being a brazen hypocrite, doing the exact opposite of what Jesus had ordered his own followers to do, as seen in the following:

Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. (Mt 6:1-6)

Governor Sanford … if I may be so bold as to ask … how is it that I — godless heathen that I am — know your own Bible, and the teachings of your own Jesus Christ, so much better than you do? I wonder if you have the courage to answer that question.

Evangelist Tony Alamo — currently being tried for various child-related offenses (e.g. child abuse, child pornography, etc.) — has had a long and storied career of using his cult either to skirt the law or flout it outright. All by himself he exemplifies many of the problems associated with religions. His recent trial has brought out a number of revelations which are surprising even to his watchers. This can be seen in this AP report (via Yahoo News):

In the years after evangelist Tony Alamo took the 14-year-old girl as a bride, she said, she caught glimpses of her father on the surveillance cameras that fed into the minister’s office.

As her father walked by outside, monitors provided views from every angle. But even though only a few walls and doors separated them, leaving Alamo’s home without permission was unthinkable.

Alamo was a prophet, she’d been taught. He was “God’s chosen one.”

I’m trying to figure out how a man who possesses extraordinary divine insight, enough to be called a “prophet,” somehow has to rely on security cameras to know what’s going on in his own compound.

But it’s not coming to me.

And I suspect it never will.

Tony Alamo is no stranger to the US legal system; the AP article mentions that he’d done time in the ’90s for tax evasion. The degree of control he exerted over the lives of his moronic sheep was extensive:

At the compound more recently, followers filled out request forms for everything, whether clothing or toiletries. Alamo himself approved all expenditures, witnesses said.

Alamo’s house, meanwhile, had television, a swimming pool and ponies in the backyard — unbelievable luxuries for a life one described as floating just above the poverty line.

The point of Alamo’s hypocrisy becomes crystal clear in the very next sentence:

Those amenities led at least one mother to push her underage daughter to become an Alamo wife, testimony showed.

The prophet used these luxuries in order to “get some.”

I’m also trying to figure how a “prophet” needs to use enticements like this in order to acquire wives, but … again … it’s just not coming to me.

Oh well.

The sheer ridiculousness of Alamo’s operation is apparent:

Families were prohibited from keeping food at their homes, the 20-year-old woman said. Alamo also banned his followers from eating meat or dairy products. At one point, on a layover at a Las Vegas airport, the woman said she and another Alamo “wife” committed a sin — they ate a cheese pizza.

Sometimes, Alamo put requests from his followers on hold in order to have money to print the church’s apocalyptic tracts.

Those fliers, outlining everything from Alamo’s feared “one-world government,” his belief in flying saucers and his hatred of the Vatican, served as a backbone of the ministry after he stopped preaching in the wake of his 1994 tax conviction. Each person had a distribution quota, the 30-year-old woman said.

Records in Alamo’s office included the “account,” she said — a list that showed how much literature each follower passed out on the constant cross-country tracking trips. …

Interesting. Once again, a “prophet” somehow requires record-keeping in order to know what his sheep are doing? He can’t somehow manage the feat of just “knowing” what they’re doing, on his own?

A true paradox!

At any rate, propagating fear of a “one world government” would appear to make Alamo what R.T. Carroll of the Skeptic’s Dictionary calls a PCT (or “paranoid conspiracy theorist”). That’s all we need … a lunatic Christian evangelist out to rid the world of nefarious dangers like the Bilderbergers, the Illuminati, and Pizza Hut!